Word: nouveau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When a mania for art nouveau swept over Europe in the 1890s, Louis Comfort Tiffany was ready with an American version of the new style. The 88 color plates in The Lamps of Tiffany Studios (Abrams; 178 pages; $120) demonstrate the distinctive artistry of the designer, who used 5,000 colors and textures of glass to confect his fanciful, flower-bedecked shades. For 40 years his Long Island foundries turned out the lamps that cast a gaudy glow in U.S. homes. Then Tiffany objects went out of style, and in the early 1930s their creator went bankrupt. In the late...
...food, the Japanese have a hard time seeing themselves as any kind of threat. "In our history of 2,000 years," says Taro Aso, a member of the Japanese parliament, "this is the first time that the Japanese have not had to worry about poverty. We are nouveau riche, a nation of farmers a short tune ago. It is difficult to accept international responsibilities when you have an inferiority complex...
What the two exhibitions show above all is Fabergé's astonishing diversity. The artifacts range from relatively austere stone boxes and clocks, perfume flacons, letter openers and an art nouveau cigarette case given to Edward VII, to what Fabergé called his objets de fantaisie: a windup, tail-wagging silver rhinoceros, a love-sick frog on a silver column, and-in jade, nephrite, agate, chalcedony, quartzite and other gem stones-a dormouse out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a litter of four sleeping piglets, and minimenageries of meticulously observed birds, fish and beasts...
...metalwork: boxes and buckles, necklaces and rings, all made with perfect competence and a brisk sense of design, none of them markedly different from or technically better than the general run of high-quality craft metalwork that came out of Barcelona in the years of el modernismo, or art nouveau. After 1900, when González moved to Paris, he and his sisters made a living by selling such things in a boutique. What with his metal ornaments and their laces and embroideries, the González clan in Paris was closer to the fashion industry than to the centers...
Since then, Nordic designers have given every European style their distinct mark. Denmark's Georg Jensen's silver and opal Dragonfly brooch (1904) and fellow Dane Erik Magnussen's Grasshopper brooch (1907) of silver and coral are unmistakably art nouveau. They are also unmistakably Scandinavian. Like virtually all the objects in this exhibition, they show the patient toil brought to bear on stubborn, natural materials. This is what Frank Lloyd Wright called "organic" design...